Three articles in the Jan. 21 edition of the Addison Independent (“Farmers Can Make Change,” “Farm to Plate Videos Help Entrepreneurs” and “New USDA Dairy Business Innovation Center Opened”) suggest that Vermont’s conventional dairy farmers are hard at work addressing their industry’s impact upon water quality and the effects of COVID. There is no question that Vermont dairy farmers and their coop leaders could influence water quality and no question at all that they could benefit from innovative ideas. But the articles ignore a few large issues that are endemic to the conventional modality and if the farmers do not change, these factors will destroy what remains of their industry:
(1) The 2015 TMDL tasked Vermont agriculture — which of course means conventional dairy — with reducing its contribution to lake pollution by 66% but to date the industry has reduced its contribution by only 11%.
(2) Vermont dairy presently produces about 2.1 billion pounds, or 21 million hundredweight (cwts), at a cost of $420 million.
(3) The median Vermont dairy farmer’s cost of production is +/- $20/cwt, which is about $4 higher than the prevailing Federal Milk Marketing Order price and $4/cwt higher than the cost of milk produced in the Midwest and western states.
(4) The forecast for Federal Order No. 1 is for an all-milk price of $16.40/cwt, which means conventional Vermont dairy will lose $71 million this year.
(5) The conventional Vermont dairy industry cannot improve these numbers while importing 40,000 tons/year of artificial fertilizer, while importing 600,000 tons/year of feed supplements and while housing more than one cow for every three acres on which that cow’s feed is harvested and her manure is spread. These facts cannot be altered if our farmers insist upon farming conventionally: the Vermont dairy industry is and has been for at least the last five years $70-$125 million short of breaking even.
Sixty years of empirical data tell us without a doubt that the conventional Vermont dairy industry’s failure to change invites more of these consequences:
(1) higher and higher annual production
(2) lower and lower Federal Milk Marketing Order prices
(3) less and less favorable debt-to-equity ratios
(4) steadily rising farm attrition
(5) steadily rising lake pollution.
James H. Maroney, Jr.
Leicester